“Apart from painting and gardening, I’m not good at anything.”

Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.

It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Everything changes, even stone.

Light is the most important person in the picture.

I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

I still don’t know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.

When I look at nature I feel as if I’ll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you’re working.

Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is fog that gives it its magnificent amplitude its regular and massive blocks become grandiose in that mysterious mantle.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

The real subject of every painting is light.

A single rose can be my garden – a single friend, my world.

The garden of the world has no limits, except in your mind.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.

Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.

It is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in – what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

In the land of Gods and Monsters, I was an Angel living in the garden of Evil.

Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing.